Acer C7: $200 Buys You a Chromebook With Something Resembling a Battery

Acer's new C7 Chromebook: $200 and less than 4-hours of battery life. Image: Acer

It’s been more than a year, but a new Chromebook has emerged from a company other than Samsung. On Tuesday, Acer announced the C7 Chromebook. As with Samsung’s latest $250 Chromebook, the new Acer C7’s most notable feature is its price — $200, in this case.

But while the low price is a selling point for the C7, there is a major downside in the equation. too: an astonishingly low 3.5-hour battery life. The C7, when closed, is about an inch thick and weighs 3 pounds. It also features a 1.3-megapixel camera set above an 11.7-inch display. On the inside, the C7 has a 1.1-GHz, dual-core Intel Celeron 847 processor and 2GB of RAM. It also sports three USB ports and one HDMI port.

Bucking the trend of previous Chromebooks, which have smaller solid-state, on-board storage, the C7 uses a 320GB disk drive. As with the $250 Samsung Chromebook, the C7 comes with 100GB of free Google Drive cloud storage for two years from purchase.

The C7 will go on sale in Best Buy stores and through Google Play on November 13.